If we are looking purely at performance it is fair to say that the dual GPU systems are faster in a number of benchmarks, sometimes by a significant amount. As always though there are caveats. The first and main being the reliance on driver quality and profiles.

If we had to pick one of the systems from this or the original launch review as gamers, we would lean towards the GTX 580. Our reasoning? A solid gaming experience at 1920×1080, no reliance on driver profiles, low noise cooling with smooth fan speed increases and the great 3D/PhysX solution.

Based on the AMD 890FX/SB850 chipset, the ASUS Crosshair IV Extreme will support any AM3 based Phenom II, Athlon II and Sempron 100 series CPU. Since this is a Republic of Gamers enthusiast motherboard, packed in along with the instruction manual and the drivers CD is an extra eSATA expansion bracket, 3x SATA 6.0GBps cables, 1x SATA 3 cable, 1x USB cable, rear i/o panel cover and an RoG sticker for your case.

Ultimately, the only downside I can think of the ASUS Crosshair IV Extreme motherboard is the fact that the Northbridge fan makes too much noise, something that is also resolved to some extent in the BIOS as well as ASUS Fan Xpert suite bundled with the drivers CD.

Like the SB750, the SB850 south bridge chip supports an overclocking feature called “Advanced Clock Calibration” or simply ACC. How exactly this new feature works is completely obscure, as AMD does not explain how it works in details.

The new A890GXM-A2 is basically an updated version of the A890GXM-A with two USB 3.0 ports added. Smaller differences include a better color scheme, the removal of one PCI Express x1 slot (to add room for the USB 3.0 controller chip), and the addition of a core unlock feature, which is only available on the 2.0 revision of the A890GXM-A.

The x2 adds a daughter card with two additional Sandforce controllers, bringing the total to 4, meaning it now uses all of the available channels of the on-board SI RAID controller! Back when the RevoDrive was released, I asked / begged for them to consider a 4-channel variant.

Like the RevoDrive, the x2 does not support TRIM as the on-board SiImage RAID controller is incapable of passing those commands onto the SandForce controllers. The big advantage of SandForce controlled flash is its excellent handling of fragmentation. Without TRIM at play, these chips can still maintain full write speeds after the most challenging write patterns have taken place.

The new firmware enables two things: very aggressive OS-independent garbage collection and higher overall performance. The former is very important as this is the same controller used in Apple’s new MacBook Air.

Sequential speed is higher on the Kingston drive but that is likely due to the size difference. Random read/write speed are nearly identical. And there’s one phrase in Kingston’s press release that sums up why Apple chose this controller for its MacBook Air: “always-on garbage collection”.

This is great for delivering consistent performance, however it doesn’t come for free. I am curious to see how the aggressive garbage collection impacts drive lifespan. Kingston ships the V+100 with a 3-year warranty and to Kingston’s credit I haven’t had any other drives die as a result of wearing out the NAND.

It comes out the box with an extra few MHz up its kilt, and is eager to push on further even leaving the voltage at stock. With a judicious tweak of the voltage thanks to the superb ASUS Voltage Tweak BIOS we hit the giddy heights of 950MHz. Let there be no doubt at all that once the “Ultra” editions of this card come out, 1GHz Core Speed should be easily achieved. You could do it on this if you’ve got a waterblock to hand.

Starting off with the ASUS in single card formation, we’re are left with the over-riding impression that the Zotac was, almost unbelievably, an unlucky chip in the silicon lottery. When we tested that we were astounded by its performance and how relatively cool and quiet it is.

GeForce GTX 580 has a brand-new codename “GF110-375″,its die size and transistors are compliant with GF100,which features 512 CUDA Core,32 Cores form a SM,totaling the amount of 16,every SM is the multi-core processor,supporting up to 48 warp,managing 1576(48*32) real-time threads,and the 16 SM can manage up to 24576 threads.

GF110 can be considered as improved GF100,three are not many changes in architecture,die size,amount of transistors,complete 16 groups SM and 512 CUDA Core can make good use of the power of Fermi architecture.GeForce GTX 580 outperformed GeForce GTX 480 by 18% in average.

As for power consumption,GTX 580 is 10w lower than GTX 480 in full-loaded state.Temperature is only 83℃(case-sealing condition),at the same time,it solves the noise problem,the noise is acceptable with fan speed of 2220RPM.

Our results shows that the 1120 shader version of the HD 6850 often offers about 5% better performance compared to the 960 unit retail HD 6850. However, the card also consumes about 30 watts more power, almost as much as the HD 6870, which offers about 15~20% greater performance over the reference HD 6850 (960 shaders).

Today we want to find out how it goes on the HD 6850, one of our favorite new midrange cards and see what it does for us when it comes to overclocking. We’ve seen people reach the 1GHz mark on the core clock and today that was our aim with the help of some extra voltage on that core.

At over 1GHz the HD 6850 is just a beast; you can see it’s got some serious performance and really the HD 6870 at over 1GHz isn’t that much faster. The value on the HD 6850 just sky rockets when you start to tip 1GHz and there’s no denying that the clock is helped along with that Windforce cooler.

It will be interesting to see if this model comes in under the SOC naming later down the track, as we can clearly see the potential.

Beyond the reference design cards, some manufacturers are taking what is already an impressive product and pushing things even further, with features such a custom heatsink or a factory overclock, for example. One such company that is doing exactly that is Gigabyte. Their GTX 460 Super Overclock is one of the fastest models on the market, with a massive overclock and a a beefy cooler to keep temperatures under control. That is a very alluring combination, no doubt.

So are there any downsides here? Well, it is possible to overclock a couple other 460 models as high as this one. The Gigabyte SOC doesn’t necessarily overclock higher than the competition; it just comes already pre-overclocked for you.

For the MSI N450GTS Cyclone 1GD5/OC, MSI claims that the cyclone design can bring down the temperature of the video card, making it up to 17 degrees cooler than the reference design. The GTS 450 is already a very cool running video card, and a very good overclocker. An additional 17 degrees cooler would make it ideal for tightly enclosed cases with low ventilation or for the would-be overclocker.

Besides acheiving playable frame rates in most of our tests and running cool under stress, the MSI N450GTS Cyclone offers the functionality that comes with the GeForce 400 series. PhysX and CUDA, as well as NVIDIA 3D, are great additions to just normal gaming and media viewing.